TIME Magazine reports Jack Raisner’s work on the Senate Fair Warning Act of 2019 and the New Jersey Severance Law in major article on employees’ rights in mass layoffs

Retail Workers Are Trying to Escape the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ as Jobs Disappear and Prospects Dim

“As more sudden retail layoffs happen, Jack Raisner, a professor of law at St. John’s University, says he sees an opening for states or the federal government to pass more protections for retail workers. He recently helped New Jersey pass a bill that updates the WARN Act to apply to more retail workers, which he hopes will inspire similar bills in other states. The New Jersey bill, which was signed into law last month, was a response to mass layoffs that left hundreds of Toys “R” US workers who had worked through the holidays with the promise of severance without any such pay, he says. It says that any company that employees at least 50 people in the state is required to give 90 days notice of a mass layoff; without such notice, it must pay all laid-off workers at least four weeks of back pay. If they don’t give 90 days notice, employers must also pay terminated employees one week’s pay for every year they’ve worked there. “Putting people out on the street after years of service without anything is a horror and a tax on the public,” says Raisner. He also worked with Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Chuck Schumer of New York to craft the Fair Warning Act of 2019, which would update the WARN Act nationally. The bill was introduced in November. “The anxiety over these layoffs is unabated despite what everyone says about this economy,” Raisner says. “I think there’s a real grassroots movement interested in something happening about this.

– Time Magazine (see full article here)